In Democratic Individuality, I argued that at a high level of abstraction, modern conservatives, liberals and radicals believe that the best economic, social and political institutions foster each person’s individuality. Their differences are largely empirical or social theoretical. All clash with modern authoritarians. I will take up practical issues such as torture and the lineage of the neocons and link them to larger issues in how we conceive a decent regime, locally and internationally.

About Me

I am John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx's Politics:Communists and Citizens (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago March, 2012).

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Wikileaks and Elite War Crimes (forum today, for those in Denver)

Today at 4:30 there will be a forum on Wikileaks with Dean Christopher Hill (formerly Ambassador to Iraq), Professor Joe Szyliowicz, Professor Nader Hashemi and me in the cybercafe on the first floor of the Korbel School of International Studies.

The insightful article below by Gareth Porter makes it clear that torture done by Iraqi soldiers reported in American military documents was licensed by General David Petraeus as part of an attempt to kill the Sunni insurgency against the illegal and immoral American occupation of Iraq (the occupation was a result of aggression barred by Article 2, section 4 of the United Nations Charter). By detaining, torturing and killing civilians, the United States succeeded in ethnically cleansing Baghdad and other areas, but created Sunni support for or acquiescence in Al Qaida in Iraq which has murdered many Shia civilians through bombing and would have been discredited among Iraqis much more easily but for the war crimes of the American occupation. The brief, pretty much one day presentation in the American press of the Wikileaks documents - choked off by President Obama, revealing the corporate media, even with this Pentagon Papers-style scoop, as a kept or war press, not a free press - suggested that ordinary American soldiers tolerate war crimes. But those soldiers often reported them. In addition, Wikileaks released a film of General Peter Pace and Rumsfeld talking with the press. Pace said rightly that it was the legal obligation of soldiers to stop the crimes when they were happening. He alone in the hierarchy may have a case against being a war criminal. Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that soldiers did not have to stop the crimes, but merely report them up the hierarchy to superiors. Those superiors then buried them...

In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies tried the Tokyo War Criminals - notably generals - for command responsibility and executed them. The law concerning command responsibility holds: an officer is responsible for crimes of war unless he or she takes steps to head them off. Where Pace did his duty, Donald Rumsfeld and David Petraeus are guilty of the crime of torture (Rumsfeld has long been guilty; Porter's story reveals that Petraeus consciously chose this means, recruiting the Wolf Brigade of Shia torturers and similar Kurdish "commandos" to stamp out the Sunni insurgency). In my post of John Mearsheimer's debate with Col. Peter Mansoor on Newshour here, I underlined the treaties, including the Convention against Torture signed by President Reagan, and the American laws, notably the Supremacy Clause, Article 6 section 2 of the Constitution, which make those treaties the highest laws of the land. See also here. But the point here, for which Porter's article provides evidence, is that Frago 242 (Fragmentary Order 242) which requires reporting incidents up the hierarchy, not stopping them, is the smoking gun for elite war crimes.

Former President George W. Bush is currently engaged in a book tour. In his book as well as in a previous comment in Toronto, W. said, "damn right!" he waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The torture memos, at one time commendably released by President Obama, make it clear that KSM was waterboarded 183 times in a month (the CIA torturers were so disturbed by what they were doing - which accomplished nothing except producing "information" for wild goose chases - that they begged Cheney to let them stop. Cheny's enforcer, David Addington, screamed at them over the phone to continue to waterboard the prisoner 6 times a day, asserting that they were "soft," not real men. Former President George W. Bush is the leading war criminal. But the American elite, notably President Obama, has now made itself accomplices to torture. The reviews and op-eds in the New York Times, even Maureen Dowd's or the interview by Matt Lauer on CNN - all the kept media - duck these issues. Manfred Nowak, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (the leading constitutional lawyer in Germany) called again for the arrest, under the Convention against Torture, of these former officials by the United States' government. This is an American obligation....

No official of the Bush administation can now or for the foreseeable future travel abroad (though Bush, the decider, still tells interviewers, if they ask a serious question, to "read the book" - even to hawk it, he cannot speak - he can no longer attempt the English market or even go to the Canary Island off Spain, where he and Tony Blair met with the corrupt President Aznar, far from the Spanish people). For all America's power, the "dark side" that Cheney spoke of going to in 2001, the crimes of the elite against previous obligations of the American leadership to international law (against torture and against aggression), stand out. Porter's article reveals the political secret of the military documents, but the even more important feature, which this post underlines, is the the guilt of high officials for crimes of war.

US 'exploited' Iraq communal strifeUS military deliberately sent Shia and Kurdish commandoes into Sunni areas for torture, Wikileaks documents show.

Gareth Porter 05 Nov 2010

Some US officials admit the Iraq strategy exacerbated sectarian violence and torture

The revelation by Wikileaks of a US military order directing US forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the US military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger US strategy of exploiting Shia sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the US war.

And General David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shia and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shia and Kurdish police commandoes in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show.

That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shia rule and was a major contributing factor to the rise of al- Qaeda's influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shia violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians - mainly Sunnis - were killed.

The strategy of using primarily Shia and Kurdish military and police commando units to suppress Sunni insurgents was adopted after a key turning point in the war in April 2004, when Civil Defence Corps units throughout the Sunni region essentially disappeared overnight during an insurgent offensive.

Two months later, the US military command issued "FRAGO [fragmentary order] 242", which provided that no investigation of detainee abuse by Iraqis was to be conducted unless directed by the headquarters of the command, according to references to the order in the Wikileaks documents.

The order came immediately after General Petraeus took command of the new Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq (MNSTC-I). It was a clear signal that the US command expected torture of prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi military and police operations against Sunni insurgents.

Petraeus knew that it would take more than two years to build a competent Iraqi military officer corps, as he told Bing West, author of the The Strongest Tribe, in August 2004. Meanwhile, he would have to use Shia and Kurdish militias.

In September 2004, Petraeus adopted a plan to establish paramilitary units within the national police.

The initial units were from non-sectarian former Iraqi special forces teams. In October, however, Petraeus embraced the first clearly sectarian Shia militia unit – the 2,000- man Shia "Wolf Brigade", as a key element of his police commando strategy, giving it two months of training with US forces.

In November 2004, after 80 per cent of the Sunni police defected to the insurgents in Mosul, the US command dispatched 2,000 Kurdish peshmurga militiamen to Mosul, and five battalions of predominantly Shia troops, with a smattering of Kurds, were to police Ramadi. But a few weeks later, after the completion of its training, the Wolf Brigade was also sent to Mosul.

Hundreds of Shia troops from Baghdad and southern areas of the country were also sent into Samara and Fallujah.

It did not take long for the Wolf Brigade to acquire its reputation for torture of Sunni detainees. The Associated Press reported the case of a female detainee in Wolf Brigade custody in Mosul who was whipped with electric cables in order to get her to sign a false confession that she was a high-ranking local leader of the insurgency.

But an official of the US command later told Richard Engel of NBC that the Wolf Brigade had been a very effective unit and had driven the insurgents out of Mosul.

The Wolf Brigade was then sent to Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad, where the Association of Muslim Scholars publicly accused it of having "arrested imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump…"

The Wolf Brigade was also deployed to other Sunni cities, including Ramadi and Samarra, always in close cooperation with US military units.

The war logs released by Wikileaks include a number of reports from Samarra in 2004 and 2005 describing how the US military had handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". The implication was that the Shia commandos would be able to extract more information from the detainees than would be allowed by US rules.

General Martin Dempsey, who succeeded Petraeus as the commander responsible for training Iraqi security forces in September 2005, hinted strongly in an interview with Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News three months later that the US command accepted the Wolf Brigade's harsh interrogation methods as a necessary feature of using Iraqi counterinsurgency forces.

Dempsey said, "We are fighting through a very harsh environment... these guys are not fighting on the streets of Bayonne, New Jersey." Contrary to the Western notion of "innocent until proven guilty", he said the view in Iraq was "close" to the "opposite".

Vargas reported, "For Dempsey, a big part of building a viable police force is learning to accept, if not embrace, the cultural differences."

A second stage of the strategy of sectarian war against the Sunnis came after the new Shia government's takeover of the Interior Ministry in April 2005. The Shia minister immediately filled the Iraqi police – especially the commando units – with Shia troops from the Badr Corps, the Iranian-trained forces loyal to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Within days the Badr Corps, along with the Wolf Brigade, began a campaign of mass arrests, torture and assassination of Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere that was widely reported by news agencies.

The US command responded to that development by issuing a new version of the previous order on what to do about Iraqi torture, according to the Wikileaks documents. On April 29, 2005, the US command issued FRAGO 039 requiring reports through operational channels on Iraqi abuse of prisoners using a format attached to the order. But no follow-up investigation was to be made unless directed by higher headquarters.

The former Minister of Interior, Falah al-Naquib, later told Knight-Ridder correspondent Tom Lasseter that he had personally warned Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials about the sectarian violence by Badr police commandoes against Sunnis. "They didn't take us seriously," he lamented.

In fact, the US military and the US Embassy were well aware of the serious risk that the strategy of relying on vengeful Shia police commandos to track down Sunnis would exacerbate sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia. In May 2005, Ann Scott Tyson wrote in the Washington Post that US military analysts did not deny that the US strategy "aggravates the underlying fault lines in Iraqi society, heightening the prospects of civil strife".

In late July 2005, when Petraeus was still heading the command, an unnamed "senior American officer" at MNSTC-I was asked by John F. Burns of the New York Times whether the US might end up arming Iraqis for a civil war. The officer answered, "Maybe".

The US-sponsored Shia assault on the Sunnis gave al-Qaeda a new opportunity. In mid-2005, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, announced the creation of a special unit, the Omar Brigade, to combat the Shia commando torture and death squads. That led to the massive sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad in 2006, when thousands of civilians were dying every month.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in US national security policy.This article first appeared on the Inter Press Service News Agency.

2 comments:

The new Israeli ambassador presented his credentials in Copenhagen. Those tortured by war have the right to asylum. But this guy was not only a self confessed former practitioner but also a current professed believer. Now this is where things get ugly.

At that time ten years ago Denmark was trying to make a name for itself as a torture treatment centre.Never mind Saddam's Cuban doctors advise.